I would respect Ed (and Gary Marcus) more if they would concede the occasional point. But everything AI is always a hyperbolic and unqualified disaster. I suppose that's what the audience wants.
"every bit of AI demand ... that exists only exists due to subsidies"
Really? NOBODY would pay whatever the fully-loaded cost is? What about people running local models on their own GPUs? Are they being subsidized too?
I like to read Ed (and Gary) as a counterbalance to the AI hype that is pervasive.
But Ed reads more and more like he has been personally wronged by the AI companies and is on a righteous crusade to destroy them. He has plenty of valid criticisms, but he comes across like he has his head in the sand when he can't seem to acknowledge any potential upside at all related to AI. It's starting to feel like he's just interpreting news and events to fit his worldview, which isn't that valuable as a reader (unless I want that worldview affirmed for me).
To everyone saying "we've done this before" or "we're not even landing" - we have sent humans to the Moon a total of 9 times. This is the 10th. Nobody has been out there in 50+ years. We've only landed on the Moon 6 times, and this mission is a stepping stone to future manned landings.
Do people really feel like "yeah, we went 9 times, that's enough, no need to ever send anyone again"?
Not "no need to ever send anyone again" but it's certainly not very interesting at this point. Maybe it's worth the spend, maybe not, but either way I don't find doing something a 10th time very intriguing. It first happened in the 60s. My father isn't even old enough to remember it. Doing the same thing as then, today, is very hard to care about. Might as well tell me that we're inventing a 10th form factor for a vinyl record.
The 1960s and 70s were extremely turbulent, chaotic times in the US - the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, multiple high-profile assassinations, etc. Apollo 8 launched at the end of 1968, which was a famously challenging year with many disruptive events.
Of course we have many challenges today as well, but I don't think the political environment is unprecedented. One could easily have argued in the 60s that we should be focusing on civil rights, ending the Vietnam War, etc. instead of going to the moon. In fact, much of the messaging around space in the 60s that allowed those missions to happen was based around "war weapons" and the Space Race with the Soviets.
One could argue the Apollo program itself was responsible for creating a lot of the hope you mention.
Portland has so much to offer (especially in terms of restaurants and neighborhoods) it's hard to sum up in an article like this! I'm sure that's true of any medium to large city, but I think Portland punches above its population culturally.
It seems pretty clear there is some sort of bug that only some people are experiencing (or, very cynically, perhaps an A/B test). My usage hasn't seemed to change much in the past few days, but then I see reports where people are hitting limits after one or two prompts. I doubt that could be user error or new limits.
Strongly agree with the sentiment, but I'd say if you're familiar with the terminal you may as well just install it and truly 'learn by doing'!
I could see this being great for true beginners, but for them it might be nice to have even some more basics to start (how do I open the terminal, what is a command, etc).
Yes, yesterday's post got marked as duplicate because I didn't reference the previous post from last year. I got permission from the HN moderator tomhow to repost it again with the reference to last year's post.
Interesting - thanks for this info. I'll have to look into the certificates. I wonder why it eventually worked though if the issue is expired root certificates?
Realistically the laptop is pretty old even to run Catalina. I don't expect it would handle a more modern OS very well.
Multimodal AI will lead to an interesting arms race in ad detection vs ad insertion. I played around with AI ad removal with older Gemini models, but it seems like this would be even more powerful to instantly identify ads (and potentially mute or strip them out).
Nice article. I saw someone depicting the future of web search with AI. The conclusion was not the bright future. Simply put, ads will never go away. Either AI providers will get paid for whitelisting ads, or even worse these AI will directly promote advertised products.
People could collectively decide to start paying for stuff and most of our gripes could at least switch to providers not accommodating their customers.
To which I'd say to the advertiser, "Good luck paying off the AI adblocker running in my closet at home."
Then again, let's not be too hasty here. Let's see what you're willing to offer. I can sell you the eyeballs of the AI ad-watcher running in my closet for $10/impression. Or, for $1000/impression, you can bring your message to the attention of myself, an actual human. A bargain at any price!
"every bit of AI demand ... that exists only exists due to subsidies"
Really? NOBODY would pay whatever the fully-loaded cost is? What about people running local models on their own GPUs? Are they being subsidized too?
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